Dr. Joseph will review the historical and contemporary role of education for Native Americans and how this leverages the necessity to increase opportunities for educators to engage culturally responsive schooling. Dr. Joseph will share his experiences as an educator to highlight a community framework he’s used to claim the role of an educator and has used to address micro and macro tensions existing in education.
Intro/Outro Music done by Keith Jones of Krip Hop Nation. His information is below:
SoulTouchin' Experiences
E-mail:Kpjones@dasoultoucha.com
Web:dasoultoucha.com
Krip Hop Nation Website:
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Welcome to CollabCast
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Welcome Welcome to Urban collaborative podcast. We are here to listen to stories and personal experiences of people in our community, their successes, how they got there and advice that they might share with others who are facing some of the same challenges and opportunities they may have had. Each of our podcast speakers will connect us to the theme of the month that we are looking to explore with you all our urban collaborative members and Ruchika Chopra, host of this series that we call club cast a resource from the urban collaborative supporting over 100 districts in 29 states across the country to build equitable and inclusive practices. During the month we will also have access to a scheduled Zoom meeting around this theme, and additional related resources will also be shared. These topics concern issues that you have told us you are grappling with and want to learn more about. We are continuing our conversation today from a fall meeting which happened last week in Phoenix, Arizona. The theme of the meeting asked us to address the question, how are the children asking the participants to share their stories of youth empowerment? One of our keynote speakers who spoke to help answer the question and share stories of youth in his community and the steps that he is taking to address issues that are found impacting them is Dr. Darrell Hammond Joseph. In his current research, Dr. Joseph investigates culturally responsive schooling as a practice to initiate change in pedagogy that serves as an additional facet to educate American Indian children. He also questions how the intersection of special education and American Indian Studies foster new knowledge concerning the identity of American Indian students with learning disabilities. He shares that his research is informed by his experience focused on the intersection of disability with social cultural differences that inform educational inequities for American Indian and Alaskan Native youth. Through an indigenous lens of resilience, his work into advance opportunities for individuals experiencing disability to persist in education, health and wellness and cultural well being. He is currently working as the director of the NAU office of Native American initiatives and the Institute for native serving educators. Our conversation today with Dr. Joseph will be framed, framed around five broad questions that we have shared with him. But really, we are here to learn and hear about his experiences, learnings and Research. Welcome, Dr. Joseph. And thank you so much for taking our time to share your work. Thank you, Richard. I appreciate the invitation and so grateful for the opportunity to share my story with the collaborative and think about opportunities that might exist as I come into the space thinking about representing indigenous communities thinking about serving as a pre service faculty member in training educators to become educators and special ed teachers. And so I want to start really with my introduction to the group and share with you and start from there as I talk about my journey as an educator and those components of what brought me to where I'm at today. So from using the Hopi language, new person be young matzah, burn the Hmong Kanaka, Bhubaneswar, now, I didn't get to Socionics about the time but I said in my language is my Hopi name, which is Buddhism be different than what I presented in the in the presentation because in Hopi we have many names that are given to us and today I'm using Busan pig which means spider weaving a new web. I'm from the village of multicopy, which is located in northeastern Arizona, just south of the small town of Tuba City, located on Hopi homelands. I am also a representative matrilineal II of the water coyote clan, and also Patchell annually from the snow clan. And my father's village is located on second Mesa in the village of some OB. So I'm very happy and grateful. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Thank you for joining us to do we want to start with because I know that at last week's conference, you you change the topic of your presentation to make the focus on storytelling. And can we continue that here today when we're when we're talking during this podcast is just reflecting on your own journey as an educator. Can you share some of your story about how you got here?
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Yes, of course.
So I have to go back to living in a rural community, right. And so the school population that I grew up in was not very large. My graduating class of high school seniors was about just almost probably 300 students. And that's very small, relative to what we think of as urban population school systems. Thinking about that. My journey starts, I think, even before pursuing higher education, thinking about, like, you know, my PhD and special education. But when I think about special education, I think about disability, we first have to start with understanding from an indigenous lens that there there are 574 federally recognized tribes currently in the United States, in addition to tribes that are not federally recognized, but only state recognized and tribes that are neither state or federally recognized. And in doing so we recognize the historical legacy of colonization in terms of representation, and very strong parallels to conversations when we speak about special education and the intersectionality. That includes disability for our students in asking this question about whether or not or actually how do we see ourselves in school systems in growing up, I also have a brother who is seven years older than I, he has intellectual and developmental disabilities. And at the age of, I want to say nine, he and my mother were faced with a decision to decide on where he was, he will receive his educational services. At the time, we were attending school on the Navajo reservation. And in this location, there are very limited resources. And so in these conversations through the special education process, my mother was presented with the idea that perhaps one way to gain greater access to resources for my brother was to attend a special school, called the Arizona State School for the Deaf and Blind located at that time, driving distance was probably about six or seven hours southwest.
And so when you think about that, there were many tensions that were presented one, you know, thinking about the family dynamics, what did that mean, for me, as a younger sibling, you know, the role of a mother who sent her child away, also to think about the retention and sustenance of cultural knowledge being transferred and continuing to be taught to my brother, those are things that I created some disparities at a very micro level for my family. And in addition, I think one thing that we have to recognize, too, that in indigenous communities, we don't necessarily have a term for disability, right? There is no terminology specific for disability in the ways that we use disability as a term to construct identities for students who are now receiving services, or various types of disabilities through ideal law, right. Rather, indigenous communities have focused really on an asset based framework that focused on the strengths and the resources that individuals are able to contribute to community. And in many ways, my brother was contributing to community at a very young age. And so as we think about that, I think, you know, my story starts from a foundation to understand that as I pursued my degrees in elementary special education, my master's in educational leadership with an emphasis in disability studies, and then on to my PhD in special education, there was a consistent thread and my understanding what my role has been to engage conversations as we think about equity, justice, we think about cultural dynamics, all these components of intersectionality think about how do we better serve our communities, particularly in this case, you know, indigenous communities knowing that historically, there are components of our shared histories that have reflected ways that opress the strengths that actually leverage our communities. And so in my story along my path one of the experiences I've had is really understanding my positionality as an individual that my critical initial cultural models that shaped me shaped my worldview shaped my schema have come from the village of men copy have come from my parents have
come from growing up in a community that is connected to this history of Clan ship and migration and responsibility to one another. And so there's a very strong essence of community dynamics in that. And in pursuing the role as an educator, I was not only an educator, I had to understand that I was a continue to be a Hopi educator, you know, and in saying that, what I do is I essential allies, my framework and pedagogies, and understanding that my ways of thinking are essential and critical to informing how we understand the work of Special Education and Disability Studies, right. And so in looking at that, it also recognizes the human dimensions of being in relation to one another, right, understanding that as human beings, we relate to one another as aunts, uncles, mothers, fathers, grandfathers, grandmothers, right, and siblings, brothers, sisters, and there's a very significant shift and the framework of relationality, when we start to use terms like that, that really essential eyes, this community framework. And so what does that mean, when we speak about things like the over representation, and under representation of Indigenous students in various disability categories, or representation in gifted and talented programs, there's a lot to be said there, and a lot of work that needs to be still done a tremendous amount of work that needs to be still done, you know, just in listening to you about your story and about the communities that you come from. And you talk about the themes of Clan, ship migration, community relate relationality and, and positionality that you bring to that conversation, it reminds me of so many other communities and all of us, right, that, that we all bring that to what we do and everyday the interactions that we have, and it truly forms, how we continue the work that we continue to do, and where we, where we develop our passions and where we develop our goals of our own future. And what makes that happen. I heard you say something around, that in indigenous communities that the framework of disability is more has is there isn't a word for it. And it's more acid based. And I wonder about how that kind of as that and all of these other personal experiences that you have had brings you into the conversation when you're working with educators? Who are, as I know that what being trained right now the pre service teachers, you know, how does how does all of that bring come into play when you're working with them and developing them as future teachers? That's a very good question. And I think as you asked that question, it makes me think about really responding to some of the barriers that we identify that educators are faced with,
particularly as we think about ways we engage educators to carry on the work of education, right. And I think within that, we also have to identify opportunities that allow us to have a critical understanding of how we, as educators, develop our own positionality ease, to become advocates, to become allies to become supporters to be bridge builders, for the students and the communities that we work in. And with and for, right, and I say that because in this day and age, you know, I've seen education shift in many different ways, some positive and some in ways that are detrimental to the recognition and representation of individuals coming from diverse communities. Right. So when we go back to the conversation of intersectionality, I think we can draw on many examples in current conversations around education that are siloing a conversation to accommodate a uniform method of Western education. Right, right. And so within that, where do educators find themselves? It's much too, you know, leans to the question that you asked at the beginning of the podcast, how are the children doing right? So in the same regards, I think we should be asking the question, how are the educators doing right? And so as we think about this, we identify some of the barriers of education that are demonstrated nationally here in the US where we know that there is a lack of respect for the profession. Every year, with the courses that I teach to pre service educators, one of my questions is exactly this. What are the barriers that you see in
pursuing this profession, and they say, number one is the lack of respect, immediate ly Following that is the lack of opportunity for social mobility or economic mobility. Right. And so, you know, that speaks to the way of, you know, how we are funding and paying educators who are in the field. And so as we think about that, we have to have real conversations about that, as we think about the institutions and organizations that we work for, regarding how we might go about addressing this framework, you know, that creates these barriers. And so as I think about that, you know, as I think about the barriers, you know, it reminds me that although these barriers exist, we are separate on those to the point that we lose sight of the children, we lose sight of the educators, we lose sight of the good things that are occurring, right, the strengths that, you know, we're demonstrating the resilience of our children of our educators, you know, we just went through COVID, and we're learning many things that our educators nationally have done, proactively to engage our children. And although we see are seeing some outcomes that reflect academic challenges and disparities, we're also seeing some opportunities that reflect ways that we might find opportunities to bridge a community culture of understanding this human dimension. And so with that said, going back to my experience, as a, as a Hopi educator, you know, I've created with a colleague of mine, Dr. Sweeney, when chief in Montana had a conversation. And it was about how we, as indigenous people, persisted, you know, persisted through the educational system, knowing the history that is a legacy, again, of colonization, but also knowing that we were coming from an asset perspective and asking ourselves, How do we share this story? How do we create opportunities for others to find ways to support their local communities in the name of nation building before for tribal communities, and so we reflected on the strength of our local communities. So for example, in my language, we have a term called the Home Vita. And I'll say that again, now home Vita, and anyone who's listening, I challenge you to learn how to say that. And we'll attach an article to this, that you can also access but no home, which basically means it's a very spiritual, emotional, physical way of connecting to this idea of strength and understanding where an individual gathers their strength, right. And so for example, in the Hopi Mesa, us, we often have races in our communities, where the men, women, boys and girls will participate. And if you know anything about Mesa is there are villages are located on May 6, right. So for a run during ceremony, our runs will begin below the mesa, they'll start on hard packed roads, which is pretty simple karate, you know. And then as you get near the base of the mesa, you start to engage in thick heavy sand. Right, so as becomes more challenging, and as soon as you pass that thick sand, you start this steep incline, climb up the Mesa hips up stone rocks. And that's the most difficult part of the run, as this run is taking place. Everyone taking participating in that run as a relative, a relationship to the community this race is taking place on and it happened, these races happen are in the early morning, as soon as that first break of dawn starts, runners will start running, what happens is community members are also observing the run from a top the mesa. And when that runs, starts, the first thing they'll say to the runners and yell at the top of their lungs is to say, the home Vita.
And what that means is they're encouraging and expressing the sentiments to tell these runners find the strength, find that connection. And so as a runner, and as a participant, myself and all those runs, I found myself thinking and connecting to the stories to the history to the land, to the language to the ceremonies that I have participated in up to that time that brought me the strength I needed to persist to the top of that mesa. And as soon as I reached the top of that Mesa, that community greeted me, right, just like they did with every other runner. And so in that
process, we recognize that we had relationality, not only to this individual sense of empowerment, but also understanding that empowerment is connected to the broader community. And there was this dynamic that required the interdependency and inter relatedness between myself and the community. And so we use the term the home Vita to demonstrate what indigenous youth may experience as they move from those primary cultural models, which are their primary form environments, we call that the capital H home, where they acquire these knowledge systems that give them all the tools they need to navigate spaces, new spaces that they encounter. And those new spaces we call lowercase h home, which are spaces that provide secondary cultural models, right. And so we know, for example, that many indigenous students who may have grown up in a community like I did, that's very rural, but very strongly connected to our cultural context, leave environments when they graduate, to pursue and then pursue college. They're entering in a completely new foreign environment, different environment. And so what's happening is we're asking our students to navigate the space that we're asking them to navigate, negotiate how they understand themselves, and how those positionality is from that primary cultural model form built into the secondary spaces. If children do not find a connection to place a sense of belonging in these new spaces they encounter, what we find is that they return to that safe place. And so this conversation with my colleague, and I was like, you know, perhaps this is an opportunity for us to share more about this conversation with what indigenous youth may go through with having to transition and navigate spaces. And I've had the opportunity as a special education director to experience that with students that I've served, where we ran Transition Plans that really account for the three primary outcomes of independent living employment and training and education, I saw many students take that big step of going into the secondary lowercase h home communities and then immediately returning home and the conversation was about why did you return home? And number one was, I didn't feel like I belong. So that brings us to the question of our then are we taking responsibility to bridge communities between their capital H and lowercase h home, to build a sense of community. And that brings up the conversation about responsibility, right, we have a responsibility as a community in both directions to our youth to help them persist. And so as we speak about that, then we're hoping to engage our children in finding the motivation, finding the fire to persist. Also a necessary component of building the home better or self empowerment is understanding the dimensions of history.
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Right? So that might mean on a micro level for a student that they look at their historical background of maybe the experience of going to school, what is the experience with school? Right, that that necessarily informs their current experiences. We also want to look at macro dynamics around education, you know, what is the experience of education for indigenous communities, say within the US,
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United States of America educational system, so that those micro and macro dimensions of history really inform a lot of the ways that we might find opportunities to build empowerment for indigenous youth through a known without model. So teachers have this particular framework that you that you've developed around, and I hear I hear you when you're talking about the community, the history, the capital, each home and the lowercase home. And and some of the questions that you're asking or wondering about with about the youth about the indigenous youth? And what would help them with the transition back and forth between those two spaces? How do you work with your teachers in preparing your teachers around being able to do that, you know, being able to be out there working with indigenous youth to be able to help them transition? What are some of what are some of the strategies? What are some of the things that you share with them to help them through that process? Great question. So one of the things I think that's very beneficial in any classroom and it's not always in higher ed, but I think K 12 environments as well as an
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Understanding the value of building a community, a sense of community within your classroom context. And so when I say that, what does that mean in terms of how we recognize one another as human beings? Right? I think there are many opportunities for us to centralize these components have constructed identities that detract from the human dimensions of conversations. And so alternatively, as educators, if we can find the opportunities and engage in conversations that allow students allow faculty allow educators to relate to each other, and the ways that we would if we lived in the same community together as relatives, right, as aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, grandmothers, grandfathers, it changes the dynamics in terms of how we engage in this space. Right. So I think number one, for me has always been to develop a sense of community with my students. And that would mean that we recognize the relationality within our classroom. But also understand that as we come into this space, we also have some very unique traits and characteristics of us that are very different.
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And we honor the similarities as the same way we honor the differences. Right. And so within that context, we talk about this concept of peoplehood. And people that I borrow from a gentleman named Tom home and his colleagues, and what they basically share is that as community, we recognizing ourselves as a part of community, as human beings, we must also recognize that we have dimensions that bring relationship to us. And that includes land, right to say that we are all connected to land in one way or another, land necessarily informs that the the ways that we engage, right, the ways that we survive, and then second to that is language, we all have language, and the language is connected to land. And the ways that we use language to identify space, identify objects describe objects, right? It's our experience. So we have land language, then we have ceremony, you know, in other words, traditions, right? So we all have traditions, and there are micro and macro dimensions of traditions, you know, very, at a very micro level, I could speak to, you know, our Hopi traditions knowing that, you know, I go home, and I return home to participate in ceremony. But also, at a macro level, I also participate in some of these national traditions. So we might talk about national holidays, right? So we have, we're finding some relationality there. And then lastly, is the component of land language ceremony and history. History is the largest piece, right? And I said this earlier that we have micro and macro dimensions of history. And so if you think about Bronfenbrenner, ecological model, right, we have the micro and macro dimensions. So as we we utilize kind of that diagram, we know that there's a very EMIC perspective of our worldviews and our schemas. But as we start to engage in these macro dimensions, we're finding this interaction, and when I'm able to have this conversation with students, we then take that conversation and then say, Now, how does this apply to our experience, say in learning about disabilities, and special education processes, and and students themselves will respond from a micro and macro dimension and saying from a micro, they might share similar stories to me in the sense that, you know, in their community, they never seen their siblings who might have disability or friends who had disability as deficits. Rather, they saw it as a as a strength, right as a gift. But then when you get into the macro conversations, then we start speaking about the impacts of policy and law, right, the intentions of policy and law,
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the type of language that we use, that might conflate othering
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the intersectional nature of individuals when we talk about special education, right, so it'd be really develop a complex and critical framework for having discussions that happens and occurs in a safe environment, but it has to start first with building a sense of community. So when we start to understand
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and respect the relationships we have as community, we can then jump into these very critical conversations about ways we can act as allies and advocates for the students that we serve. Yeah. And I think that what you're saying about our experiences in our communities, our experiences in places that we come from our positionality, and its relationship with the students that we work with, and bringing their, their perspective, their community, their history, into the conversation is something that I know that teachers like to be able to think about and do. But sometimes some of those procedures that you talked about those those macro policies and procedures that sometimes come in conflict, right conflict with, with some of the some of the things that we know, as teachers make sense for us to do to be able to connect with our students, and to be able to understand their perspective and where they're coming from. If I just think about the IEP process, right, sometimes how some of the language that is used around that process moves away from that asset based conversation that our communities might might be a strengths of our communities. And in definitely not ways that we talk about ourselves, we always talk about our strengths before we talk about anything that we struggle with. Sometimes the processes and procedures come in conflict. So I'm sure that you're in the teachers that you work with, and pre service teachers and others, as you continue working with them. Having these conversations must be extremely helpful for them to think about and how they continue to position themselves as they continue teaching and continue their journey as educators when you when you think about these admins, the administrators, right, a lot of our the folks are our urban collaborative members or district administrators who work with some of those teachers, and they face the challenge that that you know, that again, they recognize the importance of the work as as you share it, and the and the conflicts that they see in their systems or in in the larger system to the work that needs to happen. What are some of your recommendations to the district administrators around this? Yeah, I, you know, I have to say I commend all of all of you, all of those who are serving in those capacities as administrators, because it's not not an easy job. There are many complexities, I think, that are challenging in this day and age of education. And so, you know, thinking about some of the challenges such as, you know, being concerned with components such as school funding, right, we know, school funding is our pressing problems first facing America's education system.
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inequality in education, is another barrier perceptions, like you said about, about as teachers as a profession itself, the perception that people have run around the teaching profession, and therefore a shortage of, of having teachers who are qualified to do this work. Right. And so as we think about all of that, you know, my thought is, you know, as administrators, we are balancing one, how do we take care of our communities, right. And so I emphasize that from a very from a micro dimension, meaning that our responsibility, first and foremost is to the school that we're working with him. Right, that is the area that we have the most significant levels of influence, while at the same time, we're also balancing the larger constructs of running schools to follow policy to manage budgets, etc. And that oftentimes may detract us from the work that we're doing locally. And so you know, I see that as a really difficult process for administrators. And so it to get through that, I firmly believe that if we've done a great job of building the trust, building levels of respect, understanding the role of reciprocity and really redistribution relationality as values that are important for all of us in our schools, you know, that from bottom up from families, students, educators, administrators, you were going to find that there is an emphasis on sustaining a sense of community and responsibility to one another. Right, and so that allows us to find the empowerment to maneuver through these new spaces that we're engaging in that present challenges and barriers. Because oftentimes, the guiding light for us would be that micro level community,
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right, because we're advocating and working on behalf of the communities that we serve. Right and
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I think that's something that we must consider because it, it really, I think takes care of a lot of different parameters of functioning as a school administrator. And when we speak about parental involvement, understanding the value of education as a social determinants of health and how that provides for economic mobility of our students and their families, right addressing needs around health and well being, for our student, particularly coming out of COVID, we're seeing a greater need for this right before students can learn and achieve academically, we need to be sure their well being is taken care of.
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Right. And so, you know, looking at the role of the quality of education, and the recruitment and retention of teachers is another big challenge, or other big challenges that we see, as we think about this. And so if anything, when I think about our administrators, I think developing a culture, a culture of community with values of respect, responsibility, reciprocity, relationality, and redistribution, are key components to maintain the strength that we need to persist through the systems, right, because the systems aren't perfect. Yeah, and most definitely are not. And we've created them. Right. But keeping we've created, we've created them, but but due from what you're seeing, keeping the community that we serve, at the center of what we do, and the way that we think about things. And again, going back to the, to the question that was asked initially, then and you did that around, how are the children? Right, keeping that, that question in mind when thinking about balancing, as you put it, between between the different aspects of the roles of as an administrator, that's extremely helpful. Before we end our conversation, is there one piece of advice of general advice that you've always wanted to give an educator and this is your time? This is your turn? What would it what would it be?
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Oh, man, you know, I, I've been really emphasizing and much of the work that I do, particularly with my students is really to understand that education is community work. Right? Education is community work, and it requires everyone to be involved.
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Right. And so our task as educators is fine, finding opportunities, taking the initiative, being proactive, to create those spaces. Where we do, and a colleague of mine uses this term artwork, you know, to do the hard work of building community, and, and when the intentions are, are good. You celebrate the achievements, and you learn from the failures, and you go back and you do it again, right, learning from what you've done, and what you can do better than next time. And so to do that, it requires really a community framework for us to understand that, you know, it's it's community work. And I understand that those are some dimensions that are not are not always present, because of the influence and the level of challenges we have to implement policy and practice. Yeah, it's a challenge. Yeah. As educators, people, you know, a lot of times people will see about it being a lonely profession and being there alone or feeling that sense of loneliness when doing it. But reminding ourselves that this is like you said, community work and being able to come back to that we need to build that community to be able to sustain ourselves to keep doing it. And also then making those connections so that our students feel that sense of community a sense of belonging, and find ways of relating to each other. So thank you. Thank you, Dr. Joseph for taking the time to share. We know that learning about your research listening to your own personal and professional experiences. Considering the challenges and successes of the teachers you work with will connect with many of our listeners and listeners. We will be sharing resources and ways to connect with Dr. Joseph in our communication to our members following this podcast. We look forward to hearing from you all of our listeners on how Dr. Joseph's experience experiences and research connected with you. Again, thank you, Dr. Joseph for your time. As a reminder for further solutions to help develop our practices. We will be hosting a collab talk which is our zoom talk and sharing a collab PD this month. To register for this and other upcoming urban collaborative events and resources. Go to our Instagram page, urban collaborative ASU and click the link in the bio
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Before closing our clap cast for today we want to thank Keith Jones of Kpop for providing the music. His information will also be shared with you, Dr. Joseph, anything else before we leave? Thank you everyone and keep doing the good work that you're doing educators. We appreciate you. Thank you